We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we do choose how we deal with it.

It has been a little more than seven weeks since my last blog post.  Originally, I had planned to blog monthly about my journey along with my students’ journey to what I hoped would be an awesome class project based on my Kenan Fellows internship this summer.

However, a catastrophic event occurred a little over 10 days into the school year….Exactly.   Hurricane Florence made landfall on our coast, directly impacting our community of New Bern and Craven County. 

While, at first, I thought this hurricane would be a minor one.  I thought we would miss a few days of school, a little wind, and rain only .  However, as the rain, wind, and damage began to mount, I quickly realized that this was no ordinary storm.  I would come to realize that this storm would be an event that would change our community like  no other.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, while sitting without power, I humorously thought about how far off my original schedule of implementing my product for my Kenan Fellowship I would be.  An inconvenience to the business of our designed planter to hold our “space seeds”.  I wanted to get on with the growth comparisons of “space seeds” and “normal seeds” that the experiment called for.

Then, I began to hear about the devastation and destruction all over the county and other surrounding areas of my community.  Friends from out of town called to check on us.  A former student who is now in Italy even called because he’d heard  about the storm.

As the rain and wind subsided, I saw how much of the community was devastated.  We were informed that schools would remain closed for at least two weeks.  “My project,” I thought.  “What would happen?  My timeline that I had worked to  produce?  What of it?”

As more calls came in from my son’s teachers, friends and family saying, “We are just calling to see if you need anything.”  More messages of concern from some of my Twitter PLN (Professional Learning Network).  Later in the week, teachers, administrators, and colleagues began to rally together to use these days out of school to help our community rebuild.

During the more than twenty days without school (and some of those without power), community members, church leaders, and educators helped to distribute food and clothing to members of the community.  We went door to door to check on neighbors and help to clean debris and repair rooftops damaged by the wind and rain.  We tarped roofs, gutted flooded homes and cleaned mold stained walls.

My time out of school gave me the opportunity to reflect about the role of family and friends and the importance of community.  Ironically, it was the time out of school where I had the opportunity to get to know my community better.

Perhaps, Phil Boyte summed it up best.  He said, during the Fall Institute, that connections lead to success more than any academic lesson.  Since attending his talk, we have gone back to school:  “Back to School 2.0”, as many dubbed our return on October 18th.

I have learned over the last several weeks that we don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we do choose how we deal with it.  Eight weeks ago, I was prepared to begin lessons based on the effects of gravity on tomato seeds.  Because of the events associated with Hurricane Florence, I now see the importance of being an involved member of my community and building strong connections. 

After Hurricane Florence, our schools used elements of the Sanford Harmony program to build stronger relationships and teach empathy among the students.  I observed students sharing about their losses and talking about their experiences during the hurricane.  It is because of this, that I have decided to alter my project just slightly.  While I will continue to have students use the engineering design process to design a planter for the tomato seeds, but going forward, I will incorporate more elements of design thinking into the process of creating solutions.  I believe that it is important for students to feel like they can devise solutions to real problems based on developing empathy for the users of their creation.  Who knows? Maybe, my students will help to contribute to the design of something that will rebuild parts of our community after the devastation from Hurricane Florence.